Japanese-born choreographer Eiko Otake creates a durational movement and video installation inspired by post-nuclear disaster Fukushima that challenges the spaces of all three of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s locations.

African Artist Kendell Geers loves to hate and hates to love the father of conceptual art. In this spoken word ritual killing of the father, historical fact, mythology, fiction and fantasy are blended in a quasi-art historical spoken word performance.

An information station created by Zanele Muholi where visitors can learn about LGBTQI rights in South Africa and Muholi's long-term activism. This activation is a potent, interactive connection between South Africa and New York City.

Video and performance by Narcissister, whose live works deploy humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes, and her trademark mask – all tools in dismantling what Stuart Hall calls "fixed and closed stereotypical representations.” Short-form live works are interspersed with performances made for camera, and each evening concludes with a respondent in conversation with Narcissister.

Johannesburg artist William Kentridge, best known for drawing impressionist, stop-motion charcoal animations of postcolonial life in South Africa, interrogates Performa 17’s research theme of Dada in a new performance based on Kurt Schwitters’s seminal 1932 sound poem Ursonate.

This dynamic sonic sculpture installation, inspired by astronomy and African astronomer Thebe Medupe, is executed by the artist and his Cape Town collaborators, who play his “machines”—created instruments—all while performing movements from childhood games.

$25, $15

Ongoing Projects

Barbara Kruger’s wrapped school bus can be seen driving around Manhattan and parked outside various Performa venues throughout the Biennial. Grounded in activism, feminism and community, Kruger’s signature text is reproduced on a large-scale vinyl format, covering the bus’s forty–foot-long shell.

Created in partnership with NYC Parks and skate park designer Steve Rodriguez, Barbara Kruger will employ her signature effects and strategies to broadcast messages that engage issues of and ideas about power, desire, adoration, contempt, and capital at New York’s most popular skatepark underneath the Manhattan Bridge.

Commissioned since Performa 09, the Hub, this year designed by Berlin’s Studio Miessen, is the nerve center and heart of the biennial’s and the Performa Institute’s presence. Spontaneously intersect with staff, books, screenings, events, and artist-in-residence Kenyan literary network Kwani Trust.

Zanele Muholi is best known for the portrait series Faces and Phases (2006–ongoing), capturing LGBTQI life in her native South Africa. She spreads her #VisualActivism throughout New York City, publicly exhibiting her photographs, performing queer music, and organizing with black LBTQI communities.